A 163 Year Sentence

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himself. At the center of it all The man prosecutors were after says he has never broken the law. You can see in Dominic Okongwu the strict bearing of the Nigerian Army officer that he was when he fought in the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, in the late 1960s. He’s not a large man, but he speaks with a deep voice that serves him well in his church choir. At 64, Okongwu is no longer apple-cheeked and vibrant. He tries to dress sharp on limited means, but he often looks weary. Okongwu’s English is excellent, but a thick accent makes him difficult to understand. When he worked as a teachers’ assistant in prison, he was amazed at the poor math skills he saw. He says some of his inmatestudents came to like him and would protect him. “Africa,” they would call him. Other inmates would call him “Rape-O.” As Okongwu tells his story, his face pinches, like he bit into a lemon, at the thought of anyone molesting children, especially their own children. He then becomes angry about the parade of lawyers who suggested he take a plea, either for the initial trial or for the retrial that never occurred. Like his codefendants, he refused each time. “You are a stubborn man,” one lawyer told him, according to Okongwu. “Yes,” he responded. “I am stubborn for my innocence.” He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University at Buffalo, then a master’s in business administration from the University of New Haven, Conn., in 1984. That year, his twin daughters were born prematurely in Women and Children’s Hospital in Buffalo. When their mother’s bad health forced her back to Nigeria and the care of her family, it fell to Okongwu to raise young Chendo and Nnedi – pronounced Ned-E – and earn a living. He says he spent most of his time working to support them – during the day as a substitute teacher in the Buffalo school system and in the evening at Rich Products. He left the children during the week with a sitter, and the girls came to know the sitter and her boyfriend better than they knew their father. The arrangement that caused Okongwu to be a distant father in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the wrongful convictions of him and his co-defendants late in 1993 – because when prosecutors first heard the allegations of rape, they soon learned Dominic Okongwu had a history. The first case of abuse In 1988, when the girls were still 3, their father was suspected of abusing them. Their hymens were examined and deemed atypical for toddlers. The abnormalities, which included scarring on one child, could mean they were abused, doctors said. But suspicions shifted from Okongwu to the sitter’s boyfriend, a man later convicted of stabbing a woman to death. “There really was a legitimate reason to lay it upon him,” attorney Paul V. Hurley, a former prosecutor, said of the boyfriend. Hurley, now retired, represented Okongwu in the matter at the request of local Nigerians and people from Okongwu’s Catholic church at the time, the Newman Center at Buffalo State College. No one was convicted of sexual abuse. But Family Court Judge John J. Honan found Okongwu guilty of neglect for boarding out the twins five or six days of the week. While county lawyers continued to suspect Okongwu, he was forced to attend counseling and to learn better parenting skills. His daughters were placed in foster care – in the bungalow-style home of Ollie McNair on Poultney Avenue, near East Amherst Street, in Buffalo. On weekends, holidays and on the girls’ birthday, their father could take them to his apartment on Debra Lane in North Buffalo. But the visits had to be supervised throughout. To oversee the visits, the court entrusted Louis Eze. He was a cousin of Okongwu and also from Nigeria’s Igbo region. Eze had lived with Okongwu for months when he first came to Buffalo. The girls were fond
of Eze and called him Uncle Louis. Eze today says he took his duty seriously and never left the three unattended. At times in 1991 they were joined by Joy Wosu. When Wosu arrived in Buffalo to take her VA job, she sought out local Nigerians. That’s how she met Eze and the Okongwus. She knew few people in Buffalo and was invited on outings with the twins. The second case begins According to legal papers, the investigation into the rape charges started this way: In December 1991, foster mother Ollie McNair found the girls horsing around on a bed. One was atop the other in a manner that simulated sexual activity. Asked what they were doing, the girls answered they were doing what their father does to them during visits. As expected of her, McNair called the county’s Child Protective Services unit, and the system swung into motion. That’s one version. Nnedi Okongwu gives another. “This all began one day when my sister, Chendo, and I were playing,” Nnedi said in the first of her two affidavits. “… Our foster mother then sat us down and asked if our father taught us how to do that,” she continued. “From there it spun out of control.” It was clear by then that Dominic Okongwu did not like Ollie McNair, and the girls were in the middle. Okongwu was arranging to have the girls taken from McNair and placed with a Nigerian family in the area. It’s possible that McNair did not like Dominic Okongwu – or at least she didn’t think much of him as a parent. According to Okongwu, McNair was hoping to adopt the girls as her own. The twins place plenty of blame for their false testimony at McNair’s feet. McNair denied the accusations but rejected requests for an interview. “My foster mother and her friend … told us that if we did not do this the right way, we probably would be sent back to Africa,” Nnedi Okongwu said in a statement. “We were terrified that we would starve to death or be abandoned somewhere in Nigeria. … I was born here but did not know that that made me a United States citizen.” Said Chendo: “The counselors, our foster mother and district attorneys coached us on what to say and how to say it. As I look back, I don’t think anyone listened to us.” The connection One day in 1993, Paul Hurley walked into the County Courthouse and ran into an assistant district attorney he knew but didn’t like. The prosecutor, known for an aggressive style, scolded Hurley for representing Dominic Okongwu in the Family Court matter five years earlier, in 1988. He told Hurley he should be ashamed, that it was Hurley’s fault Okongwu was not locked up, and other assorted “crap like that,” Hurley recalled. “That’s how Cooper was,” he said. Michael J. Cooper was about to prosecute Okongwu, Eze and Wosu on dozens of counts. He was armed with evidence gathered over several months by another assistant district attorney, Carol Bridge. Bridge, now a federal prosecutor, refused to be interviewed for this article. Cooper, then and now, believes Dominic Okongwu is guilty. “If you talk to the foster mother, Ollie, when they were 6 years old she walked in the bedroom, and they were simulating sex on each other,’’ Cooper said recently. “And she said, ‘What’s that?’ And they go, ‘This is what Daddy does to us.’ ” “Now how would two 6-year-olds know how to do that if the dad didn’t do it?’’ he asked. Okongwu argues that the 1988 case colored the prosecutors’ views and made them even more determined to convict him. True or not, the 1988 case remains fresh in Cooper’s mind.
Page 1 and 2: Emeka Okongwu
Page 3: As children in an adult world, they
Page 7 and 8: Interviewing today The art of inter
Page 9 and 10: Monday October 19, 2015 The Buffalo

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